Freddie Wong’s Battlefield 4 Trailer Proves A Good Point About Graphics

Coming near the end of the decade and looking ridiculously realistic, Battlefield 4 will be set to blow our minds clear out of our faces with its intense action and perfectly realistic looking graphics.

Sure, this video is another gem from Freddie Wong, but it proves a point that I’ve been wanting to discuss for ages. Just because a game looks more realistic, it doesn’t mean that it looks good, right?

Video and more after the jump.

So by now you’ve watched the video about right? No? Then do it now before your continue reading. Pretty awesome huh? Gotta love these vids. Now that that’s over, let’s just get back to what I was saying about graphics.

You see, it’s a point that I wanted to make a while back about graphics in the past with regards to the difference between realistic graphics and good looking graphics. Gears of War 3 is by no means a realistic looking game, but it looks absolutely phenomenal. That’s because when it comes to visuals, it’s all about art direction and style.

A good example would be to take a game like Gran Turismo 5 and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. They are both incredibly good looking racing games, but for completely different reasons. While Gran Turismo has perfected the sort of lighting that fools the eyes into thinking its catching a glimpse of something real, Need for Speed is throwing in the Hollywood effects and action to make it look spectacular. Which one is better? It’s probably all a matter of taste, but in the end, you can’t just say that realism trumps non-realistic visuals every time because it just isn’t true.

If realism was the ultimate goal, then movie directors wouldn’t go so far out of their way to alter the feeling of their film’s visuals so much. The Blair Witch Project looked ‘real’ but does that mean that it was more pleasing to the eye than The 300, How To Train Your Dragon or even heavily green-filtered visuals of The Matrix.

Will Battlefield 4 really look like that? I sure as hell hope not, I see realistic graphics in my own office as I write this post, they aren’t so great. Sometimes realism is required to bring a certain atmosphere to a game and if that’s the case then it’s fine, let’s just hope that as new technology comes along, it doesn’t create a race for ultra-realism that we all probably don’t want. Well, not all the time anyways.

Big ups to Freddie Wong though, for creating another great game-inspired video. This guys just rocks the planet.

Share this:

Video games writer, editor and critic since '08. Living and breathing video games, movies and cars since the 80s. Follow me on Twitter if you love tons of gaming talk, and @pennyworthrevs for fun stuff and links.